REMOTE PROOFING — Approved On-site

The Graphic Arts Technical Foundation’s “Digital Proofing Study, Part VI,” seems to support this conclusion. The study found that about half of the survey respondents were actually providing soft proofs to a percentage of their customer bases, while only 17 percent reported doing remote hardcopy proofing with any clients. In both cases, the remote proofing users typically reported using this approach with 10 percent or less of their clients.

They may be small in number, but remote proofing users are big proponents of the capability.

Take the Holden Direct Marketing Group, for example. According to Bob Buczek, prepress manager, the organization has implemented a combination of remote soft and hardcopy proofing at two of its companies—Advance Direct and Moody Printing & Mail Marketing. The Colorado-based companies produce direct mail pieces for their nationwide customer bases.

The bulk of the work is five-over-four color (tint and spot) jobs with some color photos, Buczek says. For the pieces with color photos, a Kodak Approval digital color proof is sent out for the first round of proofing, he adds. Soft proofing then is often used for any subsequent rounds of approval, as well as for jobs that use PANTONE colors, reprint work and time-sensitive jobs, he explains.

Holden originally tried e-mailing straight PDF files for soft proofing, but customers had a hard time using the Adobe Acrobat tools for marking up the proofs. The group has since standardized on Group Logic’s Imagexpo soft proofing solution.

“The tools in Imagexpo for marking up proofs are very easy to use,” the prepress manager reports, “and using it for soft proofing reduces mistakes due to miscommunication. Sometimes when you get a faxed proof from a client you can’t make out parts of job, or the person’s handwriting is hard to read. With Imagexpo, any changes are clearly marked and comments are added as text so they’re easy to read.”